Relocating Gender Stereotypes Online: Critical Analysis of Sexist Hate Speech in Selected Social Media
Stanley Elias, Nubar Gurbanova · 2018
The ever-increasing use of social media in African countries is celebrated as it has provided people with more spaces for dialogue and individual expressions.Whereas such ever-increasing of the accessibility and use of social media spaces offers users with freedom and democratic paradigms to comment, opine and debate on social, economic and political agenda, it has also resulted to increasing forms of sexist hateful speech.In so doing social media spaces have also changed the nature of communication, as a result, sexists appear to locate their discriminative voices in the new online spaces unlike in the traditional outlets and mainstream forums.This form of sexist hate speech incites gendered stereotypes of whom women often receive the extremes of the malpractices because of prevalence of patriarchal social set ups in most African societies.In most cases in Africa, sexist hate speech will be used as a weapon of gender-based violence means to bully women into silence and to maintain men's privileges.By using Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches, this study analyzed the linguistic clues of the sexist hate speech in Facebook and Instagram social networks.On the basis of selected open accounts of Tanzanian public figures and celebrities, this study particularly observed and interrogated on how language of the users embeds ideological and social construct in order to perpetuate and exacerbate gender inequality.The study partly examined sexist hate speech in the selected Russian social media to comparatively study how sexism is construed and perceived in the community.